IN-DEPTH: Lives saved, money spent on non-fatal shootings

Apr. 6, 2013

Khyren Landrum of Avondale gets a hug from one of his teachers, Luecreasia Walker, at Rockdale Academy in Avondale. Khyren was the victim of a shooting a year ago on Blair Avenue. / The Enquirer/ Joseph Fuqua II

HELP KHYREN AND HIS FAMILY

Go to Fifth Third Bank branches to donate to account to assist Aiesha Landrum and her family with expenses related to her son’s injuries.

THE HIGH SOCIETAL COST
OF NON-FATAL SHOOTINGS

• In 2009, Cincinnati averaged 35 shootings a month, with the public absorbing a $385,000 in emergency costs. Multiplied over 12 months, taxpayers paid about $4.6 million to care for victims. • The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that 341,328 non-fatal firearms injuries took place in the United States from 2003 through 2007. • At Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, the range to treat a gunshot victim as a trauma case – one in which an organ is damaged, not a graze-like or surface wound – stretches from $50,000 to $100,000. • The Attorney General’s Office, through its Ohio Victims of Crime Compensation Fund, in 2012 distributed $13 million – including $830,379 to 264 crime victims in Butler, Clermont, Hamilton and Warren counties. • In 2012, among the $1.147 million paid to crime victims in Kentucky, the Crime Victims Compensation Board awarded $172,700 to 116 crime victims in Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties. • The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2011, 17.8 of every 100,000 Americans suffered non-fatal gun injuries.

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AVONDALE — On the first night of spring a year ago, 4-year-old Khyren Landrum was shot in the hip while walking home with his mother and sister from a Blair Avenue park.

Lit with wide eyes and crooked smile, Khyren’s face would become that of change in urban Cincinnati.

The shooting led Police Chief James Craig to host an Avondale community meeting attended by 250 people, plus a meeting with Avondale’s religious leaders to discuss violence and increased patrols in the neighborhood. Within a month, Cincinnati City Council renewed $250,000 for the anti-violence program Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) that the previous council had cut.

Avondale, remarkably, after tying Over-the-Rhine in 2011 with 11 homicides, the most of any Cincinnati neighborhood, has been the scene of only one homicide in the past 15 months – when a police officer shot a suspected drug dealer whom police said fired first.

Non-fatal shootings, however, remain steady throughout Cincinnati – 73 in 2013 through March 31, with a neighborhood high of seven in Avondale. While Khyren’s made an impact, most are little-noticed.

Yet non-fatal shootings like Khyren’s – and those sustained by six other people ages 17 to 21 in Avondale in the week before and after his – illustrate the high cost of violent crime here and around the country.

The initial cost of emergency treatment for a shooting victim ranges from $20,000 to $30,000, said Robin Engel, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati and leader of CIRV’s data collection and analysis. That amount does not include hospitalization or other follow-up care, and 55 percent of that cost – or $11,000 for each shooting – is paid for by the public, Engel said in a 2009 study.

In 2009, Cincinnati averaged 35 shootings a month, with the public absorbing $385,000 in emergency costs. Multiplied over 12 months, taxpayers paid about $4.6 million to care for shooting victims.

“Any way you slice it, it’s a big number,” said S. Gregory Baker, CIRV executive director and former city of Cincinnati safety director. “It’s a number we should be managing by reducing shootings and homicides.”

The cost to treat uninsured gunshot victims was $11.3 million – about $40,000 per person – in 2009 at University of Cincinnati Medical Center, according to hospital records. Follow-up treatment costs about $2.4 million in hospital resources. In 2009, 292 “violent gunshot wound” victims arrived at the hospital’s emergency department.

At Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, the range to treat a gunshot victim as a trauma case – one in which an organ is damaged, not a graze-like or surface wound – stretches from $50,000 to $100,000.

Wounding of little bystander alarms, awakens community

Khyren, who turned 5 in January and since has started preschool at Rockdale Academy, spent seven nights at Cincinnati Children’s. A bullet blasted through his left hip and out his buttocks. He used a walker and underwent two weekly sessions of physical therapy at Children’s for the month after his release from the hospital.

“I am lucky that he was not killed,” said his mother, Aiesha Landrum, 31.

March 20, 2012, was unseasonably warm. The high temperature reached 84 degrees. Khyren and his mother and sister walked up Blair Avenue toward their apartment on Reading Road.

It was 7:15 p.m. Two cars, one in pursuit of the other, turned off Reading and sped down Blair toward the park. Witnesses said the first car stopped suddenly where Perkins Avenue intersects with Blair. The driver of the chase car sped past and slammed on his brakes. A passenger jumped from the first car and shot toward the second. One of the bullets struck Khyren in the left hip. The little boy got up, tried to walk a step or two, stumbled and fell, witnesses said.

His blood stained the sidewalk for months. The emotional scar remains. To this day, when his mother asks Khyren if he wants to play at the park, he says no. He still reacts anxiously to sirens.

Rockdale principal Cheron Reid approached Khyren’s mother before spring break to tell her the school will offer a four-week summer school session for students who’ve experienced trauma. The nonprofit St. Aloysius Orphanage will provide mental health services and counseling, she said.

“Instead of seeing these shootings as normal, this little boy woke people up,” said Mitchell Morris, a former CIRV outreach worker, Avondale resident and current recruiter for the Phoenix job-readiness program at Cincinnati Works. “What happened to him is not normal.”

Police now treat shootings equally to homicide

The night of the shooting, just a few blocks north on Reading Road at Hirsch Recreation Center, a new community-based anti-violence program called Moral Voice was introduced by neighborhood leaders to a few dozen residents.

Focused first on Ridgeway Avenue and later Burton Avenue, Moral Voice follows a simple strategy of identifying the relatively small number of offenders who cause the majority of crime and chaos in a neighborhood and tapping people of influence in the criminal’s life to offer the troublemaker services to stop the shooting.

Started in March 2012 on Ridgeway, Moral Voice identified 12 offenders. Six engaged in conversations with people of influence, such as former teachers, coaches, ministers or relatives. As of August, four of those six had not committed any more known criminal offenses.

Craig, while saying the police alone can’t stop violent crime, is nonetheless leading an aggressive attack on non-fatal shootings.

“We have to have the same attitude about shootings that we do homicides,” Craig said. “One is too many. We can no longer sit back and accept this.”

Through March 31, Cincinnati had experienced 12 fatal shootings of its 13 homicides, one a fatal stabbing. The city had 73 non-fatal shootings through March, or a total of 85 shootings.

That was almost the same as last year, which through March 31 saw 10 homicides, all of them fatal shootings, and 77 non-fatal shootings, for a total of 87 overall shooting incidents.

Societal costs include prosecution, prison

Beyond the physical challenges, gunshot survivors face psychological obstacles that can affect them and society for a lifetime. Survivors of firearm injuries also incur losses in productivity, ongoing medical costs and long-term disability, according to the Firearm & Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center.

Some research shows that the national price tag of non-fatal shootings reaches $100 billion annually, according to the center’s 2011 Resource Book on Firearm Injury in the United States.

U.S. taxpayers pay about half ($1.1 billion) of the total lifetime costs of treating gunshot injuries, with private insurance, victims and other sources covering the rest, according to the Penn center. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that 341,328 non-fatal firearms injuries took place in the United States from 2003 through 2007

“The tip of the iceberg are the shooting victims who are killed,” said Dr. Victor Garcia, a trauma surgeon and founding director of Trauma Services at Cincinnati Children’s. “What’s too often invisible are the victims who live.”

The Firearm & Injury Center at Penn reports that the most serious of types of injuries sustained by non-fatal shooting survivors are amputation, traumatic brain injury and spinal cord damage; 16.5 percent of those injuries are to the spinal cord and help explain the disproportionate number of young people using wheelchairs in urban communities.

Six men were indicted in January and each charged with two counts of felonious assault in connection to Khyren’s shooting. Five of the six defendants – Rashid Lattimore, 25; Shaquille Smith, 20; David Alexander, 26; Masai Torbert, 43; and Antonio Huff, 45 – face additional charges of illegal weapons possession because of previous felony indictment or conviction. Masai Williams, 26, faces two counts of felonious assault.

A pretrial hearing is scheduled for April 17 in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court.

Some of the cost estimates of violent crime also figure in the lost earnings of defendants and offenders, the cost of prosecuting them and the expense of incarceration.

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections reports that it spends $164 a day to house an inmate in a state prison.

Ohio and Kentucky are among the states that provide financial compensation to crime victims.

With very few words, life goes on for Khyren

The day before spring break, during his preschool class, Khyren made a bird’s nest out of noodles and placed two candy eggs in it.

He played with classmates on an iPad designed for his grade level. He is learning to spell his name.

After school, he walked home with his mother and one of his two older sisters, Ameriah Massey, 7, who is in second grade at South Avondale school.

At home, he sat close to his mother and resisted answering even the gentlest questions about the life of a 5-year-old boy – one who has already survived a potentially fatal gunshot wound. With a little prompting from his mother, Khyren spoke up.

What do you like about school? “Everything,” he said.

What do you like to do at home? “Go outside and play with the other kids.”

Aiesha Landrum wasn’t much more talkative than her son.

What concerns you most about Khyren? “Nothing really, now. But I want to get him counseling.”

What was your reaction when you saw him smile for the first time after the shooting? “I knew he was going to be OK.” ⬛

I write about determined people trying to make a better life in the urban core. Reach me at mcurnutte@enquirer.com